Re: Air Medivacs, Normandy to Berlin

On Feb 23, 4:33 pm, Bill Shatzer <bshatze...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Found this:
<snip>
C-47s, after flying vital supplies
to the front, took on patients, litters being fitted to collapsible
racks. Twenty-four patients made each trip along with a surgical
technician and a flight nurse.

The maximum commercial passenger load of the DC-3/C-47 was 32
passengers. It's hard to imagine 24 patients, plus medical personnel,
were transported on C-47s, especially when only 16 to 18 patients were
all that were carried on the more-comodious C-54, which in later
versions could carry up to 50 regular passengers. By comparison, the
huge Lockheed C-141 Starlifter, used to evacuate wounded troops from
Vietnam, could carry 200 combat troops but only 103 litters. I would
think that the C-47 would have been hard pushed to deal with more than
a dozen or so patients on litters, although less-severely wounded
soldiers might have been accomodated on a short flight.

Bob Ingraham

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